The press night of Michael Boyd’s
production was postponed for three weeks due to injury. Its
rescheduling provided numerous fortuitous parallels between the
modern-dress action onstage and the political drama unfolding outside
the theatre. In Antony, we see the grizzled old leader who suffers a
slow but steady haemorrhage of loyalty yet still tries to thunder on
until too late, and even botches his suicide; in Octavius Caesar, the
(comparatively) younger opponent, more composed, a cooler tactician and
better at selling plausible nonsense when required; and in Cleopatra...
who or what? Possibly the Mother of Parliaments itself, seduced by one
major figure but then under pressure from the other until... well, the
analogy can’t be pressed too far.

The comparisons seemed all the more compelling because, alas, the
production doesn’t. Even sitting in the front row, close enough to read
the size markings on Cleopatra’s handmaidens’ espadrilles (Charmian has
bigger feet than Iras), I felt oddly distanced from proceedings.
Darrell D’Silva, his fingers still bandaged after his revolver mishap,
is a first-rate actor with both the magnetism and the power required to
play Antony, yet somehow neither manifests. This is a somewhat
trivialised Antony. In Act IV, the night before the final battle with
Octavius’ forces, Antony’s soldiers hear a strange noise under the
earth: one explains, “’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony lov’d,/ Now
leaves him.” Boyd inexplicably changes the god to Bacchus, and the
noise sounds like a bunch of drunken revellers going on somewhere at
closing time.

Kathryn Hunter, too, clearly contains in her petite frame all the
skills and range necessary for portraying the mercurial yet charismatic
Cleopatra, with force of personality supplying the sense of beauty and
captivation which her unconventional looks might not obviously do. And
she gives a fine performance, but that’s the problem: it is a
performance. This is “Kathryn Hunter presents Cleopatra” rather than
Cleopatra herself. She is not hammy or ostentatious, just a couple of
steps removed from the person of the queen. John Mackay as Octavius and
Brian Doherty as Antony’s lieutenant Enobarbus inhabit their
performances to a greater extent, but at times – and puzzlingly – the
production has scarcely more life in it than the obviously rubber asps
in the final scene.